Beach Fossils

Captured Tracks;
2010

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If you've followed indie's trade winds over the past year and a half, you can probably predict what a Brooklyn band called Beach Fossils sounds like to a staggeringly accurate degree. In this case, please set aside the prejudices: Beach Fossils aren't merely trying to evoke the feeling of sand between your toes, and even if you think you've mentally checked out of anything summery and lo-fi, this is a wonderful record. Dustin Payseur's Captured Tracks band claims influence from improvisational jazz, classical music, and Stereolab, and his songwriting owes more to loop-based composition than garage-bound woodshedding. From the functionality of the song titles on down, Beach Fossils has purpose and economy. It's built on cleanly picked single notes stacked over complementary bass patterns and unobtrusive drums.

Despite working in generally constricted song patterns-- there's little in the way of verse/chorus structure-- Payseur has no problem letting his vocals and guitar craft hooks. In fact, it's the guitar riffs that you'll probably end up humming: check the pitch-shifted Peter Hook homage on "Daydream", the tight "Youth", or "Sometimes", on which Payseur falls just shy of soloing. Drift and atmosphere also work for Beach Fossils: the breezy coda of "Window View" feels like it could drift forever as long as it handed you a lemonade part of the way through.

The way Payseur's vocals are masked with reverb brings to mind the early singles of the Clientele, while the interlocking musicianship bears a lot of similarity to their tourmates in Real Estate. But while Payseur has an ingenuity with melody, what keeps him from reaching the heights of those acts is a lack of true immersion. The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean works in miniature, capturing evocative details that we otherwise miss in our daily lives; Real Estate's Martin Courtney is big-picture, using a generalized suburbia as a backdrop for larger philosophical points. In comparison, the mundanity of Beach Fossils can be deflating, and you don't catch much on the fifth listen that you didn't on the first-- a song called "Vacation" is about taking a bus out of town, while "Golden Age" and "Daydream" are nearly every bit as literal.

Yet the lack of guile can also be a strength, giving Beach Fossils a directness often attributed to more aggressive styles of music. Detractors might claim that this stuff isn't particularly challenging, but in light of its near-Memorial Day release date, doing so feels like criticizing white t-shirts or ice cream cones. This is an uncomplicated soundtrack for relief, which "Lazy Day" puts forth most pointedly. It's something like the photo negative of Wavves' "So Bored", not just sonically but philosophically-- having fuck all to do isn't some sort of grounds for cracking up, but for kicking back and enjoying it.